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HENRY MILLER

HERMANN HESSE

NOUR NOUR

KENDRICK LAMAR

Our Character,

a Passionate guy.

October 1st, 2025

Herman Hesse portrays the inherent duality in our identities by symbolizing their extremities in his characters Narcissus and Goldmund. Behind the cloistered walls of Mariabronn monastery, a German monastic school, Narcissus, a young monk, pursues a life of extreme discipline and abstinence, an exemplary teacher amidst their ranks. Withdrawn from the world’s chaotic nature, he lives in a carefully reasoned edifice of spiritual commitment, a life governed by prayer bells, meditation, and intellectual pursuits. Into this sanctuary arrives ardent Goldmund, a student imbued by his father with an ambition to pursue this same sacred path, developing a natural admiration for Narcissus.

In establishing the contrast between the thinker and the artist, Hesse carves out two symbols of human identity. Narcissus is the paragon of the paternal path, distilling meaning through rigorous intellectual contemplation. He has surrendered to his nature through the abstinence and discipline required by his path. Goldmund lies on the other side, the epitomical symbol of the maternal path, where meaning is derived through immersion in life’s immediate intensity. His acute sensual awareness seeks to plunge into the free, raw experience of existence. These inherent differences materialize into opposing needs: Narcissus requires detachment and tranquillity, Goldmund engagement and fervour. One is grounded in ideas and axioms, the other in earth and sensations. This dichotomy reflects our own inherent duality, allowing Hesse to explore human identity. It is a meditation on how to reconcile our complementary nature, the Goldmund and the Narcissus that lies within us, the eternal question of which to nurture, of how to live.

"Natures of your kind, with strong, delicate senses, the soul-oriented, the dreamers, poets, lovers are almost always superior to us creatures of the mind. You take your being from your mothers. You live fully; you were endowed with the strength of love, the ability to feel. Whereas we creatures of reason, we don't live fully; we live in an arid land, even though we often seem to guide and rule you. Yours is the plenitude of life, the sap of the fruit, the garden of passion, the beautiful landscape of art. Your home is the earth; ours is the world of ideas. You are in danger of drowning in the world of the senses; ours is the danger of suffocating in an airless void. You are an artist; I am a thinker. You sleep at the mother's breast; I wake in the desert.”

This encounter awakens the visceral facet of his nature that conflicts and cannot be reconciled with the synthetic identity he is pursuing. His authentic being still dormant, he interprets this turmoil as a failure to overcome the challenges of his monastic path. Narcissus, instead, knew very well what kind of person his friend was. He was not blind to his radiant beauty, his innate vitality and exuberance. He saw Goldmund’s nature being armoured with a hard shell of illusions, faulty upbringing and parental exhortations, and deemed it his responsibility to unburden Goldmund of all of these inhibitors.

“It had been the enormous effort, ever renewed, ever unsuccessful, to forget the preceding night. Solely the moment at that dark kitchen window, the breath and the words of the girl, the clasp of her hands, the kiss of her lips. At the sight and kiss of a pretty girl, his youthful need for love had just been powerfully aroused and at the same time hopelessly frightened off. In his heart of hearts he felt that all those dreams for his future, everything he believed in, everything to which he believed himself preordained and called, was threatened by that kiss at the window, by the look from those dark eyes.”

One night, he is urged to slip out of the monastery, acquiescently following his companions beyond its walls. He experiences his first fleeting encounter with a girl, the visceral appeal to his senses troubling him deeply. Having accepted the fate of this monastic life, and aiming with youthful fervour towards an ascetic ideal of piety, this discovery threatens his conviction and culminates in violent physical illness.